A 15-billion-dollar lawsuit has hit the Biden Administration after it cancelled the Keystone XL Pipeline. The Canadian developer claims massive damages from the reversal of the Trump policy to finish the pipeline… which was a reversal of the Obama policy. After more than eight years of study and hundreds of meetings with state, local, tribal, and federal officials, the developers had their contracts destroyed when Biden killed what was the most advanced and safely designed pipeline to date; the pipeline would have delivered crude with a tiny fraction of the carbon emissions of the alternatives (Buffet’s crude-by-rail or crude-by-truck). Pipelines have a safety record that is 50% better than crude-by-rail, which delivers hazardous materials safely from point A to point B literally 99.9% of the time. Is the pipeline cancellation really about the environment and safety? Or a continuation of killing U.S. energy security?

Climate change is real, and mankind plays a role, but is this a problem? Will climate change bring economic disaster? Is it an existential threat? Resoundingly “No,” according to Steven Koonin, the former Undersecretary of Science in the Obama administration’s Department of Energy. He recently released Jacki’s favorite new book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters." Koonin proves that sea levels are not surging, and that hurricanes and tornadoes have not become fierce and more frequent. Koonin is the author of more than 200 peer-reviewed articles in physics and climate science, and a professor of theoretical physics at NYU’s Department of Physics, Tandon School of Engineering, and the Stern Business School. Jacki highly recommends this book.

Can the judicial branch bend the executive branch to its will? Yes. “Sue and Settle” is back. When fringe elements of an activist movement cannot get their way legislatively - through the people’s representatives - they forum shop for judges sympathetic to their cause.  Activists sue friendlies inside the Biden administration … who then settle. This is an end run around the legislatures and a clear violation of our federal government’s separation of powers, with judges usurping the legislature’s lawmaking function. It is the judiciary’s job to say what the law is - not what it should be. 

 

Then, Jacki talks with Chris Wright, CEO of Liberty Oilfield Services, a large hydraulic fracturing (“frac’ing”) company, whose ESG report is one of the few that properly gives credit to the oil and gas industry for lifting people all over the world out of poverty. Liberty’s ESG report should be a model for all oil and gas companies.

Finally, Jacki discusses cybersecurity with Morgan Luttrell, retired Navy SEAL who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Luttrell is running for Congress in Texas, and they talk about how hostile nations can mount a cyber corps to attack the vulnerable economic underbelly of the United States.